T. JEFFERSON SMITH MARKETS HIS GOODS

Chapter 2: a bateau is a boat

Well, it was simple enough when you saw it go together: from its oak deck, ribs, and rowing benches to the elegant sweep of its clinker-built thirty-foot cedar hull. It had a high pointed front, (“bow” I learned to say, like the Duke bows to the King), curved sides, (“clinker-built” I learned), square end, (the “stern”). Simple enough, but I secretly thought it beautiful. And Mr. Jeff never built an ugly or slapdash thing in his life.

The bateau came together, and these were all words I learned that winter down at the boat-shed, which was a shake roof and one wall to break the wind, just above where the dark winter Santiam swelled and rushed; where I spent my days auguring holes in cedar planking for the oak pegs that held it all together, and hours and hours tapping strands of pitchy oakum into every seam. Or up in the mill itself, working the treadle for the whirring lathe, knocking out the bushel or so of pegs we finally used. Today I know you’d use store-bought nails or screws of course, but it never occurred to us back then; our whole house was pegs, our furniture and cabinets and beds, our cow barn, the mill itself, it was all oak pegs. John and I spent hours knocking them out, taking turns with the froe, chopping out blanks, and on the lathe with the calipers, because of course they have to be just right. I know all about oak pegs, ask me anything about them.

Now I know all about bateaux too, and you can ask me anything about them; a bateau’s nothing but a big open boat. We built our first one right above the ways, where we’d finally slide it down into the Santiam, but there was nothin’ there either at first, of course, no ways until we built them; and that was ordinary because there was never anything on our homestead until we built it. That’s where we used the oxen, and wasn’t that just a Mr. Jeff trick. We did overbuild it though, I think.

First, Kalapuya John’s nephew Jimbob took the canoe upstream, paying out a roll of half-inch twine as he went, and fifteen yards upstream he rigged a big snatch-block up on a cottonwood, and ran the twine through, then canoed back down to us. We tied the twine off to our big hawser and pulled it all around and through the block. (Pa had bartered that hawser from somewhere, I think, to use for logging off our homesite; I believe the story is that it came off of a ship originally, and that a man in Oregon City was paid cash money, and honestly, I’m surprised we didn’t have to twist up the dang rope, too.)

Anyway it all ended up with that heavy ship’s line running up the river to the anchor block in the tree and back down to our oxen yoked up on this side, and we hooked the other end up to a couple of debarked fir trunks, one at a time, and gee’d the oxen up the bank, and yarded those tree-trunks straight out into the Santiam twenty feet or so, one at a time, laid out next to each other, each with one end on the bank and the other out in the shallows, weighted down there with rocks and angled down just right. Once in position, with that big hawser tied off around a stump holding it all in place against the current pretty as you please, the two logs made a nice stable ramp to slide our big heavy boat down into the river, which was the point of the whole exercise. When it was done, all of us breathing pretty hard, and Mr. Pickering a bright pink, Mr. Jeff said, “And that, boys, is how you get the wagon over the pass through the snow without losing too many chickens to the wolves.” “But Pa,” I would say, “What wolves?!?” And watch his face to see if he’d smile. I still think it was a little overbuilt - the ramp that is, Pa's face was fine - but we should have just pushed the boat off the bank into the water. “You’ll appreciate this more when we need it, Danny,” said Pa. (Shoot. I hadn’t seen a wolf in over a year.)

Mr. Jeff sort of made a song of it sometime, only it was more grunting than singing; just something that sort of snuck out of him when he got tired of things being in his way. “Dig the damn clay,” he’d say, “Dig the damn clay, make the damn pot, melt the iron in the pot, forge the iron into a hammer, pound out the damn tools, use the damn tools to build the damn boat, all the live-long day, maryanne! Great Caesar’s ghost, Danny! Isn’t it time to quit for the day?! Let’s get these damn tools in out of the wet!”

We wouldn’t quit for the day, of course, we just quit working on that boat for the day, and then we got the tools out of the wet, but after that we did everything else too: milk the cow, feed the pig and the chickens, carry stovewood in, and water, and then it was dark, it was winter and got dark early, but we all split the chores. Mother would bring a tin lantern, and put on boots and oilcloth, and Kalapuya John, and me, we’d all work. It was raining of course, which doesn't really signify; it just rained heavy all winter. Pa couldn’t sit while others were working. Ma would try and get him to go into the house. “Go get washed for supper,” she’d say, but he’d always answer her, “Katherine, we’re almost done,” and we’d all go in together, and eat in the kitchen, and Kalapuya John ate with us most nights. That was good then, and our dinner was on the stove, and it was good, usually meat baked with carrots and spuds, and I’d eat too much and fall asleep in the chair by the fire. “Wake up, Daniel, and go to bed,” my father would say, and I’d climb the peg ladder to the loft and drag off my clothes and be asleep just like that.

And everytime Stan Pickering would come to work on the boat he’d be riding a mule and he’d be leading a mule packed with three big kegs of double-distilled two year-old corn whiskey, and I’d help him stack those kegs inside the mill and the stack of kegs growing up higher against one wall all that winter, and the stack of cedar planks going down.

Well one day the bateau was done, and we looked around and it was spring. There were yellow and white lilies on the banks of the creeks, and the plums father had bought the year before in Oregon City were a perfumed haze of white blossoms behind the barn, and the snow was melting fast in the mountains and the Santiam was as high as it would be all year, and it was time to go.

NEXT: Ch.3 The Santiam

Mark V: The Opera Act III

The big excitement for me is that Act III is well underway; (go to the page and check it out).

I just signed off on the first eleven pages. Here's the first page... (I hope you like it. It's got an almost-riot, sushi, the New York Times song, and...) well, let's just see how it all turns out...?

(con't) T. Jefferson Smith Markets His Goods - an Oregon story

Chapter 1 (continued) – in which the first conundrum is untangled

Now, the mill was our sawmill, and as far back as I could remember being alive there was that sawmill and us all working it, though of course at some point in the misty past, back way too far for me to remember, Kalapuya John must’ve muscled that water gate open for the very first time, and then the stone-lined millrace had filled up with the bright Santiam for the first time, and the great wooden water wheel spun into noisy life. Pa would’ve been standing there on the deck, hand on the clutch of the driveshaft, and he would’ve run his eye over everything then, and everything would’ve been ready, (because he built it of course), and he would have put in the clutch and engaged the saw. But we were never really done with it; you never are done with something like that; I mean, I think we spent at least half our time just taking it apart and putting it back together. My earliest memories, it seems, were me finding an oak peg for Pa, or fetching him his pipe while he tinkered, or holding something while he hit it with a big hammer. “Don’t flinch, Danny,” he’d say, “You’re gonna get hurt if you flinch.” Gonna, he’d say. He dropped his Gs considerably out at the mill though he picked them back up in the house for ma - so did I.

I did not think of that then; I was happy from my dinner if I recall, and content to let Mr. Jeff do the thinking and drop all the Gs he wanted, and I knew I would be included in whatever was planned. (And likely be called on to hold something while he hit it.) What did that mean ‘build our own ferry?’

We had a book of stories in our house, you know. Both my mother and Mr. Jeff read easily, and wanted me to also, and taught me early. Of course the book was precious, we had so few, and I remember every story in that book started with a little picture, and this one about pirates had a pirate ship, and a jolly roger flag and a parrot, all very exotic to me, and somehow this silly thing got in my head, and as I was clearing the table after dinner I was looking at that picture, in my head.

Pa and Mr. Pickering put back on their oilcloth slickers after dinner, as did I, and we walked down through the heavy rain to the mill, and into the half-light inside to a stack of dry lumber against one dark wall; a stack of twenty foot cedar 1 x 10 planks the color of smoked salmon, as pretty as you please, and stacked as tall as I was, that we had built board by board the winter before, the winter I was twelve years old; neat, level, seasoned, and ready...for what?

The rain was a steady beat. Pa said, “Refresh us, if you would, Stanley: how did you and Mrs. Pickering get in-country from the Umatilla… or did you come that way?”

Mr. Pickering reached out to feel of the pink squared plank-end at eye level in front of him, and picked at a small splinter. “It was not a bateau, Mr. Jeff, if that’s what you’re thinking. They were there, of course, and folks were using them, but Elizabeth did not like the looks of the Injun who was offering to guide us, and to be honest, I did not like the looks of the river; not that it mattered anyway, we couldn’t pay. You will remember I have told you that Elizabeth and I were at the end of our string there in Umatilla, Mr. Jeff, although we had been pretty well outfitted when we left Missouri. We had took losses on the Platte and Snake crossings that summer. When we finally reached the Columbia, we sold what outfit we had left for pennies on the dollar, bought one old Nez Perce horse, some food, some moccasins (because we were barefoot), some black powder and percussion caps, and walked Sam Barlow’s road over Mount Hood, and down the valley to just upstream from you, Mr. Jeff, right here on the Santiam. You recall that was four years ago.”

“Four years already. Do you ever regret it?” asked my father, and I looked up, surprised at his question. Mr. Pickering stood up straighter then, and looked my father in the eye, and with a bit of a smile said, “Despite the damn rain, sir, not even for one moment do I regret coming west. Nor Elizabeth neither. Not for one moment. Now tell me, Mr. Jeff: did you bring me out here just to admire this great stack of cedar?”

My father looked back at Mr. Pickering and smiled. “Such a good neighbor,” he said, “And such a good partner.” He stuck out his small thick hard right hand; Mr. Pickering looked puzzled, and amused, and then clasped my father’s hand in his own large fair one. I remember now how both of their hands had little wounds on them, some healed and some new and raw, and broken dirty nails too, though none of that was remarkable then; all men's hands looked like that. My hands looked the same. They shook and let go, and Mr. Jeff said, “The best cooper in the whole valley, and we’ve got him right here, Danny. Can you believe our luck?” “Yes sir,” I said. My father went on, “Mr. Pickering, your barrel-making, your skilled hand and eye is why we have any whiskey to sell.” Mr. Pickering retorted, “Your milled white oak, sir, and the tools you ordered from Ft. Vancouver when mine were lost in the Snake River. And let us remember, that it is you who knows how to make the whisky from corn, though I am improving my effort. Three years running now, and a quality product, if I do say so. And I do say we want a more reasonable return on our labor.”

“Well, Pickering,” said my father, “We are looking here at enough dry seasoned cedar to build a substantial bateau. You help me build it this winter, and run it down the Santiam and the Willamette this spring, and your labor, including your cooperage, will pay to freight you and your whiskey to Oregon City’s buyers, with extra on top. What do you say? It will be profit free and clear for you.” “Oh well, Mr. Jeff,” he said, “That’s not hard. As I said earlier, if you will be our leader, why sir, I’m your man.” “Good!” said Mr. Jeff; “Done. And what about you, Danny?” “Right with ever-sharp, sir,” I said smartly, “But one thing...what’s a ba-toe?”